Retired soldier Tommy Lee Jones learns his son, just back from Iraq, has gone AWOL, and he searches in vain for him, running up against resistance from both the Army and, at least initially, the local police. But unlike most military-crime dramas, he does not unfold some huge conspiracy that reaches to the very top of the command chain; rather, he has to come face to face with a reality that runs counter to what he knows about his boy.<br /><br />Hank Deerfield is one of those clear-thinking, straightforward, honest characters that Tommy Lee Jones has played time and time again. In short, he's a man who knows what he wants and how to get it, most of the time, and yet here he is baffled by the sudden disappearance of his youngest son, Mike. All he has is Mike's cell phone, which includes short videos shot in Iraq.<br /><br />Quickly, though, the case changes from a missing-persons situation to a murder, as a burned, dismembered body is found near Mike's base. However, first there's a question of jurisdiction - was Mike killed on the street and then dragged to within the base's property line? No one seems to care much about how Mike came to be where he did; the official stance is that he was the victim of a drug deal gone wrong, perhaps a Mexican gang.<br /><br />Hank is frustrated, and he feels that there's more to the story than meets the eye. After all, he knows Mike would never be mixed up in drugs or anything illicit; he was a good boy. Could it be that his death was caused by one of the other three soldiers he'd hung around with the night he died? Hank's determined to get to the bottom of it all, if only to preserve the memory he has of his son. He managed to enlist the help of a local detective, Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), who has to fight through monumental red tape (and the patronizing attitude of her fellow cops) in order to work the case.<br /><br />In the end, though, it's not about exactly what happened to Mike, it's really a referendum on the insanity of war. What happened to Mike in Iraq? Did he return to the States demonstrably different from when he came? It's very difficult for the straight-shooting veteran (along with his wife Joan, played by Susan Sarandon) to grasp just how different Mike is from the boy who left home to join the armed forces, following in the footsteps of his old man and his older (and now deceased) brother.<br /><br />This is a mystery that is solved in the end, but it's not a simple explanation; even though the motives and means for Mike's murder are revealed, nothing is really settled; only more, deeper questions on top of questions emerge. This is definitely a point in the movie's favor. A typical murder mystery might be deciphered halfway through, with the protagonist fingering the villain in the third act, and everyone goes on to live happily ever after. This is so far from the case in this movie that it might as well be another zip code. We know who did it, we know why they did it, but we don't know - and Hank can only guess, despairingly - what happened to allow the situation to even occur.<br /><br />Jones is brilliant as always, and he earned an Oscar nomination as the taciturn Hank Deerfield, a resolute, devout man who is unwilling to believe that which runs against the facts he already has. Hank, a former MP, had also a methodical, insightful investigator in his own right, and his analysis of the developing case allows him to hold out hope that his son's legacy, if not his life, will be kept intact. Theron is solid as the sympathetic detective; a tough-minded, almost distant cop whose own tenacity proves essential to the case. (Although arguably she comes off pretty uncaring early on.) In the Valley of Elah, named for the place where David fought Goliath, works because of the well-cast Jones and an ending that leaves plenty of issues unresolved, to its credit. There's interaction with Emily's son that could have been excised (although it serves as the source for the movie's title), and there's not quite enough interact between Hank (who's investigating, near the base) and Joan (who's still at home, a two-day drive away); true, too, that the stiff-necked bureaucrats are a little too stubborn and uncaring. But Paul Haggis does a good job otherwise of keeping the story on track without revealing too much too soon. Even when the end is in sight, Jones' evocative, empathetic performance keeps us from being too complacent.